Our newest obsession might not seem too far from other apps such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, however there is a clear line drawn between Tik Tok and “The non-GenZ apps” which explicate the popularity of this unique platform. A shared feeling we experience before opening Instagram is the “fear of missing out”. As you carefully, or spontaneously, scroll through your feed (a neatly curated collection of pictures from people you follow) your thumb is prepared to stop swiping for when you encounter a picture of your friends at a party you weren’t invited to, or your friends going out for dinner at your favorite restaurant without you. Then, you might choose to close the app and ponder on the fun they’re having, or continue scrolling out of curiosity to find other things you are missing out on.
But imagine opening an app, and instead of seeing what your friends are doing, you see people synchronizing their moves to a choreographed dance to the song ‘Blinding Lights’ by The Weeknd. Then, you scroll and see a girl cleaning a mirror, and in one swipe of an arm, her outfit has changed and her appearance is touched up in front of a freshly cleaned mirror. Sound familiar? If not, do not worry. Because after reading this, you will go straight to the app store.
When you first open Tiktok, you will see a ‘For you’ page: a feed based on videos and accounts you interact with by liking, commenting and sharing and even just watching a video. This personalised feed has endless amounts of videos (and I mean literally) that are calibrated to your account. Without directly telling the app what or who you want to see, this algorithm will automatically bring you material you’ve shown you want to see more. Furthermore, this page is formatted in a way that is easy to scroll from one video to the next. Each video you watch takes up the entire screen on your device, and with one swipe up, an entirely different video is in front of you, just like that.
The majority of the users are between a narrow age range of 13 to 24 year-olds according to hootsuite. So chances are, the videos you find are created by people similar to your age, thus you’ll find the video content as relatable. Meanwhile, other social media platforms have a wider age range including millennials, for example, Instagram and facebook. So accordingly, it's harder to find content about highschool dilemmas and jokes that truly crack you up. Besides, TikTok includes features you won’t find anywhere else, one being the duetting feature where you simply add your video next to another and share the same sound. This can make a video go viral as more people duet the same video, creating trends that form a close community within the app where everyone shares the same inside joke or dances the same choreography to trending music.
The friend-group like community inside the app can be found in no other platform. Rather than feeling left out of something, you are being pulled into a whole new group of people full of talent and ideas. So it’s fresh, comforting, and overall, just addicting.